This file photo, believed to have been taken in July 2009, shows a man identified by the site as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (AP/www.muslm.net)

An exclusive Associated Press report claims Mohammed, or KSM, who has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University, had been permitted during his 2003 detention at a CIA black site to design the household appliance.

The story gives a sneak peak inside the life and mind of Pakistan-born KSM, and perhaps more importantly, the thought process of CIA captors who excessively used “enhanced interrogation” techniques — what many consider torture.

So why to indulge this man’s hobby? Well, what if one day he actually stood trial or decided to cooperate? For that, it helps to be mentally sane. (KSM is being tried in a military tribunal.)

“We didn’t want them to go nuts,” a former senior CIA official told the AP.

It appears the project worked, with KSM reportedly in good health.

You can’t see the vacuum cleaner designed by the same mind that American security officials believe orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In fact, it’s unclear how far KSM got with his project, which likely ended after his move to Guantanamo when the CIA’s Romania prison closed in 2006. The design is part of an operational file, which means it’s highly classified and could never be seen by the public.

“It sounds ridiculous,” Jason Wright, KSM’s military lawyer, told the AP. “But answering this question, or confirming or denying the very existence of a vacuum cleaner design… would apparently expose the US government and its citizens to exceptionally grave danger.”

The recent devastating car bombing in Mogadishu has been blamed by Somali officials on the terrorist group al-Shabab. But the violence (and famine) that have beset Somalia have deeper roots — decades of imperialism and intervention, and use of Somalia as a staging grounds for the “war on terror.”

Buried among statistics on gun profits and lobbying efforts is the terrifying reality of just how unique America’s gun obsession and associated violence are. And the equally terrifying plan by the NRA to “normalize” gun possession in nearly every nook and cranny of American life.

U.S. campaigns for regime change characteristically focus on the “madness” of the “dictators” to be toppled. In the case of North Korea, the narrative is spiced by the country’s developing nuclear capabilities — which North Korea views as its main line of defense against . . . regime change.

Aung Su Kyi, the leader of Myanmar, has been accused of “legitimizing genocide” against the country’s Rohingya Muslims, despite being a Nobel Prize laureate. Her country’s military has massacred thousands of Rohingya, leading some to call for Kyi’s Nobel Prize to be revoked.